There are arguments over what it is to be human. Aristotle argued that it is the power of speech and the sense of good and evil or justice and injustice. Descartes, with his ‘cogito ergo sum’, argued in his Meditations that humans were the only animals with minds. Kant argued that with our technical, pragmatic and moral skills that we can join our minds with mechanics to manipulate things, we can treat other people pragmatically for our own purposes and we can treat each other according to principles of freedom under a set of laws. Linked to this is the idea that the opposable thumb gives us the ability to use tools in ways no other animal can. For Charles Darwin, the difference between humans and other animals was one of degree rather than kind, that things such as emotions, curiosity and reason are just better developed in people than they are in other animals.

All these have some truth, but while language is a critical component of what it means to be human, our narrative ability is what makes us stand out from other animals, our ability to tell stories, not just stories that are fictional, but stories that tell us something about the world, whether through the arts, the humanities or the sciences. Aristotle was right about the importance of speech. Other animals use speech to some degree, but they don’t have complex systems of semantics and syntax, or the complexity of memory that we have for stories. Narrative is a universal human activity. We are intrinsically story creators, story tellers and listeners to stories. It is what we do every day. Roland Barthes, in his classic essay on narrative (Barthes, Reference Barthes1975), said ‘There are countless forms of narrative in the world…. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings, stained glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there never has been anywhere, any people without narrative’ (p. 237).

Barthes was writing from the perspective of art and literature. The comments are applicable to the science of psychology. What is difficult to understand is why, in the 150 or so years of the history of psychology, so few psychologists have concerned themselves directly and explicitly with narrative. It is discussed in several areas such as language development, some aspects of reasoning and some memory studies, but its general absence is inexplicable. Narrative is at the heart of human endeavour. Jameson (Reference Jameson1981) describes narrative as ‘the central function of the human mind’ (p. 13), and he is right. Memory, attention, perception and so on all depend on us putting information together in narrative form.

One of the problems with studying narrative is that many psychologists believe it is non-scientific. It falls into the area of qualitative psychology which many psychologists still believe is beyond the bounds of science. This is something that needs to be addressed. There are narrative researchers who exclude themselves from traditional notions of science and have strong views about the importance of the political imperative when conducting human research using qualitative methods including narrative. I don’t want to get into those arguments here. My perspective is that narrative is, or should be, central to the scientific study of people, central to psychology. Science in its broadest form is about the systematic development of knowledge through the use of systematic methods and the development of testable theory. While narrative and qualitative methods generally may create some difficulties relating to both method and theory, there is no good reason why they should not be firmly in the camp of good science. It is about the ways we do narrative research, which I will return to throughout the book. The focus here is on applied narrative psychology, which is a particular perspective, but if we are going to apply narrative psychology, then we need to know that it is having a positive effect, or why bother with it? We need evidence that it works in the real world. The problem is, as we shall see, that while there is good evidence for some aspects of narrative work, in particular narrative exposure therapy (NET) and expressive writing, the evidence for several other applied approaches is often limited, or in some cases virtually absent. This means that you are reading a book that claims to base itself on science, yet the science for many of the claims is limited. My argument is that we are at an early stage of narrative science – partly because many narrative psychologists have not obtained the appropriate evidence – but that does not mean that what we do is of no use, it means we should start collecting some good data to provide support for our ideas on narrative so that we can develop narrative theory, method and application.

What is narrative? This is part of the problem. When doing science, we need clear definitions of our constructs. We do not have good agreement about the construct of narrative. There are different definitions, for instance, about whether a very simple language structure can be called a narrative or whether language needs a number of characteristics to be called a narrative. Abbott (Reference Abbott2008) makes the point that the basic narrative could be just putting a verb and a noun together (‘Drink tea’), which young children achieve when around 3–4 years old, which is the age from which we retain our earliest memories, so perhaps memory itself may depend on basic narratives. Mnemonic systems often rely on creating meaning by putting information into some form of story (e.g. making a list and putting the items along an imaginary walk, or turning them into the components of a story). Memory is usually improved for information that has some meaning attached to it, and narratives provide meaning. It is also difficult to look at a picture without imparting some meaning. We don’t just process information; we make sense of it. If we look at the Mona Lisa, a picture most people in the West are at least somewhat familiar with, we don’t just look at a head and shoulders picture of a woman. We wonder whether she is smiling, why she appears to be looking at us. We wonder where she is from, what the background represents. We wonder what her story is.

Herman (Reference Herman2007) has a slightly more complex definition of narrative. Informally narrative is a synonym for a story, but she proposes more formally that a narrative is a representation of (a) a structured time course of particular events that (b) introduce conflict into the storyworld (whether actual or fictional) conveying (c) the qualia – what it is like to live through the disruption. This is a helpful definition as it has a place, a series of presumably interconnected events and – which is important to make fiction interesting and to provide psychologists with a role – there is conflict which somehow needs to be resolved.

Are stories the same as narratives? We often use the terms interchangeably but there is no real agreement. At its most basic a narrative is perhaps a representation of an event or a series of events. The event (or action) is the critical element. Without something happening, the event, then we just have a description (‘the book is red’), which many would argue is not sufficient to be a narrative. To create a narrative we need something to happen (‘The red book was read by a person’). Barthes (Reference Barthes1975) suggests that a single event is not enough, that there needs to be two or more events. Others suggest that there needs to be some causal relationship. Abbott (Reference Abbott2008) argues that this overcomplicates it, and we should stick with the simplest definition rather than a more restrictive one that demands causality or multiple events.

Whichever way we define narrative we are unlikely to have a single definition that fits all cases. I favour a pragmatic approach – which is generally the way to approach applied science. If it works use it. Rather than having a specific definition of what is and what is not a narrative the important element is that it has some value in relation to what we are doing. If ‘the book is red’ is sufficient for purpose, then it is a narrative. If we need an event such as the book being read by a person, then we will use that as the basic narrative. When we are looking at the narratives created by, for instance, traumatised people, we may need more complex narratives to make psychological and scientific sense. For instance, we have been argued that traumatised people have problems constructing a coherent narrative (e.g. Burnell et al., Reference Burnell, Coleman and Hunt2006) and that their accounts of traumatic incidents are so disjointed they cannot be called narratives. For us to come to this conclusion, the narratives of these people must be complex. They are likely to include a narrator, multiple characters (who have explicit characteristics and relationships with each other), detailed plots and possibly subplots, several elements of causality derived from chronology and so on. A lot more than ‘man bites dog’ or ‘the book is red’ – though we should not reject these as narratives if the setting is appropriate. The critical point is that defining narrative for the purpose of applied psychology depends on the context in which it is to be used.

Chatman (Reference Chatman1990) argues there is the chronologic of narrative. He argues that narratives have a doubly temporal nature. In the first place, a narrative moves through time ‘externally’, that is, the duration of the reading of the novel, the telling of the story and so on. In the second place, it moves through time internally, in terms of how long the plot itself takes to unfold. For instance, it might take several hours to read a novel (external), but the novel itself is set over several years (internal). According to Chatman, the first is discourse and the second is story. He argues that texts such as an essay or a description of a rocket engine do not have this internal time sequence and so are not narratives. I disagree. A student essay is a narrative about the construction of an argument. It has no internal time element. Neither does this book. It would be unusual to say that a book such as this is not a narrative. Of course, Chatman was arguing from the arts, where the story element may need to be separated from the discourse; but I am a psychologist, and so see stories as narratives, whether or not there is a distinction between internal and external temporality (which are useful concepts in certain circumstances).

While our understanding of narrative is not entirely operationalisable, which is usually not a good thing in terms of science, we all know what a narrative is, from formal narratives such as a book, a magazine article or a lecture, to less formal narratives, such as a conversation in a café or a discussion about football. The main point is that narratives are not the sole province of professional writers and speakers, they belong to everyone. We all understand narratives, we can all create and adapt narratives, we can all express narratives to others and we can all listen to and understand other people’s narratives.

If we accept what has been argued earlier, the terms narratives and stories are roughly interchangeable in practice. They tell us about something that happened. The ones we are interested in as psychologists generally provide characters, how characters interact, some sort of plotline, cause and effect and some sort of change. Normally, something has to happen for a narrative to be a narrative. It should also be reasonably coherent, so that an audience can understand what the narrator is trying to put across, their point, the meaning of the story. Narratives have both universal and cultural aspects (Hunt, Reference Hunt2010), enabling us to cross the bridge between realism and relativism, or naturalism and constructionism. Narrative processes themselves are universal; the stories we tell are told by all cultures across the world. The expression of these narratives does vary, enabling cultural expression to take on different senses in different parts of the world. The universality of narrative processes means we can understand narrative from a neuroscience perspective, though the evidence as yet remains limited.

We are trying to understand the mechanics of narrative, the theory, the method and its applications within the context of psychology, particularly within the context of applied psychology. It is all very well saying that we all use narratives, but what does that mean in psychological terms? What is the purpose of a narrative? How might it benefit a listener or the person who constructs the narrative?

Having established a very general definition of what we mean by narrative (this will be explored in more detail in Chapter 2), we need to think about how we can use narratives in psychology. We use narratives all the time. We use a range of different narrative styles. We not only construct and employ narratives, we are the audience for other people’s narratives. Without narrative we would not be human. If we used language without narrative, it would be no more sophisticated than the sign languages learned by chimpanzees in the experiments of the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, some humans, due to some form of disability, are not able to use narrative. Such dysfunction does not negate the argument for the criticality of narrative as the norm.

As applied psychologists, we use a range of methods to try and help people. Clinical psychologists use a range of therapies to try and reduce mental health problems, health psychologists try to reduce the psychological impact of ill health, forensic psychologists try to understand how the criminal mind works and occupational psychologists try to make the workplace a better place to be. They are all using narratives of one sort or another, even if these narratives are neither explicit nor even acknowledged. A key aim of this book is to demonstrate how we as psychologists use narrative in our work, both implicitly and explicitly. The other key aim is to show how using narrative approaches explicitly can improve the work we do.

Narrative theorists, therapists and others draw on a wide range of approaches to narrative psychology. It is an area where ten experts will come up with fifteen approaches. This can get very confusing. This is an applied book. We want things that work. We are less interested in the deep theoretical and methodological conflicts and debates that occur within narrative psychology and more interested in how we can make use of narratives in our work, irrespective of our specialisms. That does not mean we can ignore theory. If we are going to use narrative approaches, then we need an understanding of theory and method, but this book will not provide a detailed explanation of the many approaches. The approach used is meant to be coherent but not completely explanatory. We need a scientific explanation for why people use narrative and how and where they use it. As I have already noted, and will emphasise throughout the book, the evidence for the effectiveness of many narrative approaches is rather weak. We need to develop a coherent set of methods for using narrative, but this does not yet exist. What I hope to do here is provide a way of understanding and using narrative, not the only way, but it is, I hope, a reasonably coherent and useful way – even if I am asking that if you do use narrative, try to employ it in such a way as to be able to collect empirical evidence for its effectiveness.

Empirical Problems

One of the main problems working in the area of narrative psychology is that, apart from the notable examples of NET (discussed in Chapter 9) and Expressive Writing (Chapter 7), the evidence for the efficacy and utility of narrative approaches is at best weak, often contradictory and sometimes virtually non-existent. As a scientist this creates a problem. We cannot go around saying we are doing science if the evidence for our theories is weak, contradictory or non-existent. How are we to deal with this?

In the first place, acknowledging a lower level of evidence will – for the moment – have to be acceptable. For many of the approaches discussed in the book, there is at least some evidence. This will be described and evaluated. Furthermore, the area itself, narrative, has emerged from the arts, through sociology, to psychology, and in the arts, evidence is of a very different kind to evidence in science. Over the years, the evidence regarding the ontological status of narrative, its very existence and nature, has been built up, theorised and well-established. There are few people who would argue that the concept of narrative is not immensely valuable when understanding the nature of people and the way they express themselves.

On the other hand, artistic theorising is not acceptable to most scientists, though perhaps they should be more open to developing understanding through the arts. Novels tell us a lot about the human condition. I have written elsewhere about the psychological understanding we can derive from Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Hunt, Reference Hunt2004). There is ample scope for developing psychological understanding through the arts. What is acceptable now is showing how narrative approaches can inform our psychological understanding and how, in the context of this book, it can inform our understanding of applied psychology.

While there is a distinct lack of evidence for some applied narrative psychology, there are well-organised procedures that can be tested, such as narrative therapy and narrative coaching. One of the purposes of the book is to provide a detailed account of where we stand with regard to these procedures (and the evidence base) to act as a heuristic for further research.

Finally in this section, we need to be aware of how widespread narrative approaches are across the whole of psychology – even though sometimes they are not explicit, as in much of clinical psychology. The purpose of clinical psychology is to help people with mental health problems make sense of their problems and find ways of overcoming them, or at least managing them, that is, to create new stories by which to live. Forensic psychology likewise. Occupational psychology is, in the end, aimed at making organisations coherent and ensuring the people within these organisations function well, that is, ensuring that the overall story of an organisation coheres with the stories of the people employed by that organisation. Coaching psychology is a relatively new area, which is about how people’s stories are problematic and need to be changed to create improved stories, more effective ways of being, whether at work or in one’s personal life.

The Rest of the Book

The book is presented in two main sections. Chapters 2 to 4 explore what we mean by narrative. These chapters are not applied, but they provide useful background understanding of ideas in narrative thought, with some practical examples. The second part of the book is concerned with applying narratives to psychological problems in various ways from more generic ideas round interviewing and analysis to addressing specific applied examples.

Chapter 2 examines the nature of narrative in more depth. Most narrative research has been conducted by people interested in understanding the nature of story and narratives through fiction. These provide important insights into how narrative works not only in fictional accounts but also in real life narratives. The rules governing narrative – such as they are – are discussed in some detail, particularly how they apply to the narratives we use in everyday life. There are fundamental disagreements among theorists about what constitutes a narrative, and as already suggested, I will take a liberal approach here. Nevertheless, the key linguistic ingredients of a narrative, character, plot, action and so on, all will inform our understanding. Narratives are not only defined by the facts that are contained in the story but also by the structure and function of the story that is told, that is what makes narrative interesting to psychologists.

Chapter 3 examines the core reasons why narratives are important to psychologists. When someone is using a narrative, it is not just the facts that are important but also the structure and function of the story. As psychologists we recognise that narratives are universal, but we want to understand why people use the narratives they do in certain situations, and why narratives sometimes fail. Why does a person with depression focus on negative aspects of their life story, and how can we help them change that and in so doing perhaps lessen the impact of their depression? Why do people who are traumatised have such difficulty describing what happened to them, often reverting to non-narrative forms of expression, using ellipsis, or omissions from speech to avoid talking about certain subjects, or describing past events (analepsis) in what appears to be a random fashion, or demonstrating a lack of agency? This chapter brings together narrative theory as it is understood by psychologists. For instance, McAdams (Reference McAdams, John, Robbins and Pervin2008a) argues that there are a number of key concepts necessary for narrative understanding in applied psychology. These include coherence, meaning, agency, construction, redemption and contamination. Psychologists are interested in how the self is constructed, identity and identity change, and the limits of construction itself with respect to human behaviour.

Chapter 3 will also examine the role of key psychological theorists who have brought narrative into psychology such as Bruner (Reference Bruner1986), Sarbin (Reference Sarbin1986), Reissman (Reference Riessman2005) and others, and how their ideas have influenced psychological thinking. In the early days of narrative in psychology, Bruner argued that psychology can be split into paradigmatic and narrative psychology, with the former being traditional experimental approaches. This distinction is problematic and may be one reason why narrative has not yet become mainstream, mainly because narrative psychology itself is paradigmatic, something not recognised by many psychologists.

The emphasis in narrative psychology has often been on how to do it rather than doing it. There is a diversity of theories in narrative psychology. It is also essential to examine the relationship between the individual and the social world. Narratives function at several levels: the personal, interpersonal, social and cultural. At the top level, these are known as master narratives. The distinction between these categories is somewhat fuzzy, but it can be argued there is no such thing as a personal narrative as all narratives are influenced by the world around us, and by our audience. Not only friends and colleagues but also the media plays an important part in constructing and reconstructing narratives. Moscovici’s (Reference Moscovici, Farr and Moscovici1984) theory of social representations provides a good example of how these issues have been discussed in psychology for a long time without necessarily drawing on narratives explicitly – even though narratives are essential to social representations. Narratives provide the best approach to understanding how we understand ourselves, our interactions with others and the world around us and how we make sense of all this.

The constructs we use in psychology are part of the master narratives of the subject, the interaction between psychologists, the users of psychology and society itself. There are two key points to be made here. The first is the nature of psychology itself and the second is how many of our theories are narrative in nature, at least implicitly. This is not to undermine psychology, but to point out the importance of narrative across the subject. The narrative of mainstream psychology in the UK for many people is that it is a scientific subject, accepting the scientific method, with the experiment as the best approach, and theories and methods derived from the natural sciences. While this has advantages, it also has disadvantages. In terms of specific theories, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) provides a good example. PTSD was created in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 1980) to describe the responses people have to traumatic events, specifically at the time the response to war trauma, though in subsequent years, this has developed to include the response to other forms of traumatic incident such as rape, sexual abuse, manmade or natural disasters, road traffic accidents and so on. There is a debate about which events should be included or not included, and over the years, the definition of PTSD in different editions of DSM has changed several times as a result of developing narratives. The fundamental problem is that PTSD is a constructed disorder. It is based on evidence relating largely to US veterans of the Vietnam War, and over the years, it has been adjusted to hone the symptoms more effectively to what is seen as the response to a traumatic incident. At the level of the narratives involved (narratives about trauma, PTSD, individual responses to trauma, emotions associated with trauma and so on), these narratives are not universal, and they are constantly changing. This fundamentally challenges the medical model. It is not that we are simply finding out more about PTSD, it is that the narrative of PTSD constantly changes to bring in more people, more traumatic event types, yet at the same time fails to account for the genuine problems people face as a result of challenging life-threatening experiences. People with a diagnosis of PTSD usually have a comorbid diagnosis of some other constructed disorder such as depression or anxiety (e.g. Ginzberg et al., Reference Ginzberg, Ein-Dor and Solomon2010). If we have this constantly changing narrative, then in what sense are we understanding the nature of mental illness?

Chapter 4 will explore master narratives, the overarching narratives that determine how cultures function. Every culture has one or more master narratives, which determine how participants think and behave to a large degree. While not everyone will agree with all elements of the master narrative – there are often subcultures, particularly in modern sophisticated liberal societies – the concept is essential for understanding the social world. The interaction between the individual narrative and the master narrative is essential for both social and individual change. We will see the effects of master narratives in certain societies and some of the problems associated with them, such as the problems of multicultural societies where there are fundamentally conflicting master narratives.

Chapter 5 looks at narrative methods. It examines where and how narratives can be used in psychological research. It includes a general outline of the ways narrative is used as a method, the different conceptualisations and the limitations of narrative as a method. There are many accounts of how to use narrative as a method – perhaps too many, as some are contradictory, and the multiplicity of approaches makes it difficult to establish best practice.

Narrative analysis is, as to be expected, mainly a qualitative approach (e.g. Wong & Breheny, Reference Wong and Breheny2018), where the researcher attempts to make sense of a script in narrative terms and draw conclusions about, for instance, the coherence of the narrative, or the meaning that is being put across. This is inevitably a difficult task due to the complexity of narrative. There are examples of attempts to quantify narrative analysis, but these are fraught with difficulty – providing a good example of how many aspects of psychological life cannot be reduced to numbers – whatever some psychologists might say.

Moving on to the second part of the book, general approaches, Chapter 6 will examine life interviews, their characteristics and how they differ from other qualitative interviews. There are two main approaches examined in some detail. Don McAdams (Reference McAdams2008b) has worked for many years on an effective life interview which examines individual narratives, which also examines how we can interpret interviews in terms of, for instance, redemptive narratives and contaminated narratives. This is a very detailed and sophisticated method and theory and is useful in practice. The other approach is one I have been developing called the Narrative Life Interview (NLI), which draws on McAdams’ work and others and is intended as a means of exploring transitions in people’s lives and to help people come to terms with, to manage, some of the problems they have faced in life.

The NLI involves two interviews, a main one and a follow up. The purpose is to explore significant transitions in a person’s life. It does not matter what the transition is, but the NLI explores its effects on behaviour, cognitions and feelings. Any transition in life can have an effect on a person, and we as psychologists should be trying to understand these effects. The NLI has been used on subjects as broad as traumatised refugees and young adults transitioning to university. It is a useful research tool. The first interview, which can last a number of hours depending on the person and the topic, is designed to obtain as much information about the transition as possible, what life was like before the transition, during the transition and afterwards, including any longer-term changes. Through the interview, the person is asked about behaviour, cognitions and emotion, to obtain a broader and deeper picture. At the end of the interview, it is transcribed and turned into a story by the interviewer. This is the significance of the narrative element. The resulting document is not just a transcription of the interview but, using the interviewee’s words as much as possible, it is the story of the transition, written from the perspective of the interviewee. This story is then given to the interviewee so they can look for inaccuracies, lack of detail, elements they wish to remove and so on. At the same time the interviewer thinks about any questions they might have, for instance, to obtain more detail at some points, or for clarification. At the second interview, these areas are dealt with. Anything the interviewee wants removed is removed, anything they want changed is changed. The interviewer asks for detail or clarification. After this interview, the account is revised and sent to the interviewee for confirmation that it is an accurate and complete account. Emerging evidence suggests that this process, again perhaps as it is helping develop the narrative, is beneficial to people who are traumatised or otherwise affected by their experiences. It is not a substitute for therapy but can be helpful. Therapy versus research will also be explored in this chapter. There is a distinction among psychologists between the two, that people conducting research should not be doing therapy. This ignores the well-established fact that the process of being a research participant, particularly in interview studies, does have therapeutic benefits.

Chapter 7 builds on the work in Chapter 6 and examines narrative writing, where people are asked to write their story, or elements of their story. Narrative writing is often used as therapeutic writing. For instance, expressive writing is a particular method of writing about a subject on a number of occasions. The writing is not analysed, it is thrown away. People may be asked to address a specific problem in a particular way or they may simply be asked to write about it. The evidence is variable, suggesting that the technique works for some people but perhaps not for others.

Chapter 8 focuses on narrative therapy, a name given for a range of therapeutic approaches. The term may be employed loosely to describe any approach that encourages people to tell or restructure their story – at the extreme all talking therapy is narrative therapy because it is intended to help people make sense of their lives and the events in their lives. Narrative therapy has several components (White, Reference White2004), such as examining the stories that shape a person’s identity, an externalising focus, whereby naming a problem can help a person see how it works and how to fix it, and a focus on unique outcomes (Goffman, Reference Goffman1961), which are central to a person transforming themselves through changing their life stories. Through narrative therapy, people identify their particular skills and abilities and use these to transform their life stories. Narrative therapy has been used in a range of situations such as eating disorders (Weber et al., Reference Weber, Davis and McPhie2007), domestic violence (Allen, Reference Allen2007) and conflict resolution (Winslade & Monk, Reference Winslade and Monk2000).

One important problem with narrative therapy is that it is a constructionist approach where there are no absolute truths, which might lead to a conflict between a person’s post-therapy narratives and the dominant cultural master narratives. This suggests a fragility of narratives whereby post-therapeutic experiences may undo any positive benefits. There are also few controlled trials examining the efficacy of narrative therapy, so the evidence base is weak.

The next chapters examine narrative approaches in applied contexts. Chapter 9 focuses on NET, which has gained popularity over the last few years, has a growing evidence base and is now accepted as an effective clinical practice in a number of countries (e.g. NICE in the UK, APA in the USA) as a frontline treatment for PTSD. NET was introduced around 20 years ago as a treatment for traumatic stress, particularly in difficult to reach populations such as refugees and people in the developing world who have survived war, child abuse or severe human rights violations. It is a manualised treatment that can be employed quickly and by and for people with limited expertise in the field of trauma.

The reason NET has become so popular since its introduction is that it draws on innate human attributes and good psychological theory. It is not a complex procedure and it is easily understood by those who are being treated with it – which is what gives it its advantages over other approaches. For example, if people understand an approach, they are more likely to engage with it – less likely to drop out. NET draws on our innate desire and need to construct narratives. It is about telling one’s life story to a receptive audience. People who are traumatised can have difficulty putting their experiences into words, the procedures of NET help them do so. After experiencing trauma, many people, though they do have difficulties verbalising their experiences without help, do want to bear witness to their experiences, to tell others and perhaps to gain some comfort for themselves or to see perpetrators punished for their behaviours. A good narrative enables a person to bear witness, and one outcome of NET is that the person has a signed account of their experiences that could be used as a witness statement in court. NET is built mainly around the critical importance of narrative and telling one’s story, but it also draws on good psychological theory about traumatic stress. The chapter will go into detail but fundamentally a negative response to trauma involves traumatic memories (so-called ‘hot’ memories in NET theory), which are difficult to control, have conditioned negative feelings and cognitions and cause a range of symptoms. NET focuses on addressing these hot memories in the context of the person’s lifeline (a series of the most positive and negative events in a person’s life), enabling the hot memories to lose their traumatic power and become part of the person’s life narrative. The chapter will examine this process in detail and the evidence relating to NET.

The chapter demonstrates the benefits of using a narrative approach in therapy, and there is very good evidence for its effectiveness. NET is now considered appropriate by NICE in the UK for the treatment of PTSD. People who are traumatised often have difficulty undergoing therapy as it can be a painful process. The dropout rates are often very high. This is alleviated by NET itself being a natural narrative storytelling process. It is not in itself difficult. The subject matter is painful, but the therapeutic process is a natural one, which means that the dropout rate is very low.

Chapters 10 to 14 explore research in a specific range of areas, narrative medicine, narrative health psychology, narrative work psychology and narrative coaching. The research on narratives in these areas is relatively limited, but there is great potential for the future. The chapter will look at research evidence but will mainly focus on this potential. In health psychology, much of the research has focused on telling stories of illness (Sools et al., Reference Sools, Murray and Westerhof2015) such as childhood cancer (Moore et al., Reference Moore, Moxley-Haegert and Talwar2015) and eating disorders (Papthomas et al., Reference Papathomas, Smith and Lavallee2015) rather than in trying to make them deal more effectively with their illness, though – as noted earlier – just the act of telling a story can help someone feel better. There is not a specific chapter on narrative clinical psychology as this is sufficiently covered in specific chapters on NET and narrative therapy. There is relatively little research within occupational psychology on narrative. I have written about introducing narratives into the performance and appraisal system (Hunt, Reference Hunt2011), with a focus on how narratives function at different levels: individual, interpersonal (e.g. manager/worker relations) and organisational. Boudens (Reference Boudens2005) used a narrative perspective to identify clusters of emotions associated with prototypical work situations, arguing that narratives were the best way to approach this topic. Scott (Reference Scott2019) explored how people make sense of their work, how they develop meanings using narratives.

Narrative approaches are increasingly popular in coaching. The basic position is that people need to change or adapt negative narratives about their lives to substitute more positive ones. The most extensive account of narrative coaching is by Drake (Reference Drake, Cox, Bachkirova and Clutterbuck2010, 2017), who discusses the importance of the narrator, their narrated stories and the narrative field. He recognises the instinctive nature of storytelling and how it is helpful in bringing about change.

Chapter 14 draws conclusions about the narrative approach, what has been achieved and what can be achieved in the future. Unlike a lot of psychology, which focuses on the negative in an (often futile) attempt to make it positive, narrative psychology is inherently positive. It is what we all do; it is how we make sense of the world. This final chapter will look back on the book, how narratives have made a difference in psychology and the ways in which we can develop new narrative approaches throughout psychology. Narrative psychology, because it has come from the arts and social sciences, has suffered from being under the umbrella of postmodernism and social constructionism, and so has alienated many mainstream scientific psychologists. It is time that this changed. Narrative psychology is scientific psychology. It is based on good evidence about how the brain is structured and how the mind functions. It is what we do naturally and so it must be brought into mainstream psychology. The book will focus largely on areas of applied psychology, but throughout this will be based on the best science we have for the narrative approach.